Everything is indented normally in my .cpp file until the moment I press the semicolon ; on the following lines --- at which point emacs indents all the way to the full length of the last line typed...
This oddly doesn't happen if I remove the access modifier and declare vars int x and int y for any class or struct..
class Blah {
private int x;
private int y;
private int z;
};
If I highlight the whole field and press < TAB >, Emacs views this as the proper indent for the region. Can't seem to find anything else related on this besides other qs on indent customization
Additional details:
C-h k ; yields this description, so it might have to do with this feature ---- though I don't understand because the indentation described appears to refer to the immediate next newline not the current the cursor is on.
; runs the command c-electric-semi&comma (found in c++-mode-map),
which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in ‘cc-cmds.el’.
It is bound to ,, ;.
(c-electric-semi&comma ARG)
Insert a comma or semicolon.
If ‘c-electric-flag’ is non-nil, point isn’t inside a literal and a
numeric ARG hasn’t been supplied, the command performs several electric
actions:
(a) When the auto-newline feature is turned on (indicated by "/la" on
the mode line) a newline might be inserted. See the variable
‘c-hanging-semi&comma-criteria’ for how newline insertion is determined.
(b) Any auto-newlines are indented. The original line is also
reindented unless ‘c-syntactic-indentation’ is nil.
(c) If auto-newline is turned on, a comma following a brace list or a
semicolon following a defun might be cleaned up, depending on the
settings of ‘c-cleanup-list’.
; is one of many keys that triggers the "correct this line's indentation" command. There's nothing special about ; here, it's just that Emacs normally keeps your indentation right according to the style defined for the file.
As 0x5453 says in a comment, your C++ file is syntactically invalid, and the indenter is trying its best to come up with a reasonable indentation for this incorrect file. If you fix your code to be legal, the indentation will also be resolved.